Warriors, Amazons, and Isles of Women: Medieval Travel Writing and Constructions of Asian Femininities

Abstract

Since the appearance of Jo Ann McNamara’s essay on the Herrenfrage in 1994, scholars of medieval gender, whether they agree with McNamara or not, have made matters of masculinity and the high medieval battle for authority one of their chief preoccupations.¹ We might be inclined to forget that McNamara coined Herrenfrage as a counterpart to the well-established Frauenfrage, or ‘women question’, and the existing body of scholarship on women who remained unmarried out of demographic necessity or of their own choice.² The prospect of women living independent of the direct authority of men alarmed many contemporary commentators. Some North-West European women turned away from marriage or the convent to a third mode of living, as beguines. Such women, thinking ahead to a theme examined later in this chapter, established what we might think of as ‘Isles of Women’ in the cities and towns of late medieval northern Europe, and were subject to regular scrutiny, suspicion, and even condemnation as heretics.³